The garden gate has a lock and the lock has a sensor, because a gate that has been left open is how a resident ends up on the road. Every morning just before light the gate sensor logs an unlock. From the outside. The gate opens, the path is walked, the back door is tried and found locked, and the gate is closed and locked again. Nothing is on the camera but the gate moving and the gravel taking weight.
I am the manager of a residential home with a walled garden and the gate in the wall is the one thing in the building that has ever kept me awake.
The gate.
Wooden, in the wall, onto the lane. A lock with a sensor that logs open and closed, because the garden is the one place residents go without a carer and a gate left open is a road with a resident on it. It is locked at dusk by the night staff and unlocked at nine by the day.
Every morning before light, it is unlocked from the outside.
The log.
About twenty to six, depending on the time of year, and it is always about twenty minutes before the sun. The sensor logs unlocked. Then open. The camera on the back of the house sees the gate and the path. The gate swings in, the way a gate does when somebody pushes it, and swings back to, not latched, the way somebody leaves it when they mean to go back out.
Then the gravel. The path is gravel, and gravel takes footprints for a second before it settles, and on the camera the gravel takes them, one after another, slow, up the path to the back door. The door handle goes down. The door is locked. The handle goes up.
And then, twice, a knock. Soft. On the glass.
Then the gravel, back down the path, and the gate closes, and the sensor logs locked, from the outside.
The key.
The gate has two keys. One is on the night staff's ring. The other was a resident's.
He had come to us in 2019 from the house next door, which shares the lane, and he had kept his garden gate key in his pocket out of habit, and it fitted ours, because the gates had been put in by the same man. He used to let himself out into the lane in the mornings to look at his old garden over the wall, and come back, and it was fine, until it was not, until the morning he forgot which gate was which and knocked on his own back door for an hour in the rain, and the new people there rang us, and we took the key.
He died in 2021. The key is in the office safe. I have looked at it at twenty to six with the log on my phone saying the gate has just been unlocked from outside by it.
What has been checked.
The lock, replaced, new keys. The gate is unlocked by the old one.
The lane, by me, at twenty to six. Nobody in it. The gate unlocks beside me. It opens. The gravel takes the steps going up. I have followed them up the path, a step behind, and stood at the back door while the handle went down in front of me and came up, and while the glass was knocked on, twice, soft, at the height of a tall man's knuckles, and I have stood in the dark kitchen on the other side of that glass and watched the handle go down and the glass take the two knocks and nothing be there.
What is done about it.
The unlock is on the gate log as a fault and the lock has been changed twice and I have stopped changing it.
What I do.
I manage the home.
I am in the kitchen at twenty to six now. When the knock comes I open the door. I say, morning, come in, it is cold. I stand back. The cold comes in off the garden, and something else comes in with it, slow, the way a tall man comes through a door he is not sure is his, and I close the door behind it, and I say, you are in the right place, and I put the kettle on.
The gate log has changed. The gate is still unlocked from the outside at twenty to six. It is not locked again afterwards. The sensor says open, and stays open, until the day staff lock it at nine and find it so, and they think the night staff have forgotten, and I have not told them otherwise.
He is not going back out to lock it. He is in. I do not know where in the building he goes after the kitchen, and I have not looked, because a man who has spent five years knocking on a back door in the dark to be let into a place that turned out to be his, and has finally been let in, is entitled to the run of it.